Three Things to Do with Your Non-Openers

By Shawna VandenHeuvel, Manager, Strategic Services

Ever look at your open rate and wonder what all of those non-openers are doing? Why don’t they open your emails?!? Is your subject line not promoting an action? Are you sending too much? Well, it is time to test the waters of subscriber engagement and see what these non-openers really want. Below are three things you can try to reengage your non-openers:

Resend – Send your non-openers the same message with a different subject line a couple of days after your original send. Make sure the new subject line has a sense of urgency and a great offer to encourage the subscriber to open it (and hopefully to click through to your website). We have seen ecommerce clients resend to non-openers and get an additional $5,000 in sales!

Test Frequency – Segment your non-openers and start sending to them at a different frequency. For example, if you typically send weekly, send to your non-opener segment every other week. Start with your six-month non-openers; you can send the same content as you do for your engaged list. This is a great way to see if you can reengage them by not sending to them as often.

Start a Reengagement Campaign – Create a segment, or a new list, of your six-month non-openers, and then create an email targeted to them. You could do “We miss you, here’s 15% off” or a really targeted message speaking to how you differentiate yourself from your competition. You can then send another message a couple of weeks or a month later with a strong call to action. After you send both of these messages, you should remove any non-openers from your sends moving forward.

It is always hard to let go of subscribers, but at the end of the day, you need your list to be working for you. That means subscribers need to be opening, clicking, and hopefully buying or reading. We have seen so many clients hesitate to do any of the three points outlined here, but once they try it and see some results, they understand why it is important to keep their list active and engaged.

Share with us what you’ve done to reengage your non-openers in the comments section below!

This article was originally published on June 20, 2012 on the iContact blog.